


Hopelessly Devoted to You

by TheBearMuse



Series: Tahni Lavellan [5]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-25
Updated: 2015-01-25
Packaged: 2018-03-09 00:02:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3228533
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBearMuse/pseuds/TheBearMuse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tahni Lavellan adjusts to life in Skyhold after Solas leaves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hopelessly Devoted to You

Tahni was fine. That was what she told everyone, at any rate. And she was, really. It was more bothersome that people kept asking how she was. As though she was supposed to be broken.

_Well, I'm not._

If anything, she felt better than she had in weeks. Solas must have known he was going to leave. That was the only possible explanation for why he had broken things off with her. It had hurt him as much as it had hurt her, if not more so. Tahni had seen the true pain in his eyes that mirrored her own, heard his voice break even before she realized what was happening. She didn't understand it yet, but she intended to find out. If Solas didn't tell her himself, then she'd find out some other way.

_He **would** have told me. That's why he had to leave - so he wouldn't have to._

Tahni kept her suspicions to herself. She didn't want to hear any theories to the contrary. No one else knew Solas the way she did, except perhaps Cole, so there was nothing anyone could say that could change her mind anyway.

She worried about the others more than herself. She'd had some time to get used to life without Solas. Adjusting the first time had been harder. Solas had pulled back completely, restricting their conversations to the subject of Corypheus. They stopped walking the Fade together and no longer slept in ruins. Even stargazing was out of the question. That was when Tahni had felt his loss most keenly, even though Solas had still been present physically. When he actually left Skyhold, it was the inevitable final step of his leaving her. It hurt, but it wasn't entirely unexpected - not with the way he'd been acting.

But Cole? The Iron Bull? They relied on Solas for support and he had known it. But only Tahni had been at all prepared for his leaving, even if it was only on a subconscious level. She'd overheard Solas apologizing to Cole for having to block their connection, but Cole himself had no memory of the conversation. If Solas had said anything to Bull before he disappeared, she hadn't heard about it.

So Tahni did her best to fill the gap for both of them. Playing chess with Bull every few days seemed to keep him grounded. She wasn't very good at it - she would certainly never be able to play without a board! - but at least winning helped boost Bull's ego. Thankfully, Tahni's erratic playing style made victories over her challenging enough to be satisfying.

Cole was much more difficult to help. Tahni lacked the knowledge of spirits and the Fade that Solas had, so she felt she had nothing to offer him. Cole knew she felt that way, of course. He tried to reassure her that she didn't need to worry about him, but that only made her worry more. In the end, they ended up talking in the rotunda as they had done before. Tahni sat on the table with a mug of hot chocolate and Cole perched on the back of the chair. The routine was so familiar that she would not have been surprised if Solas had walked in to join them at any moment. He hadn't yet, but Tahni held out hope that he might.

Not that she was about to sit by idly and wait either. With Corypheus gone, Tahni could use the resources of the Inquisition to search for Solas. _Some of them,_ she amended. She could not afford to abandon the Inquisition's true objectives, no matter how badly she wished she could. Leliana's agents and Cullen's soldiers were in the field, while Josephine and everyone else in her inner circle with connections were putting them to use. Even Vivienne had volunteered her contacts, a gesture that should probably not have surprised Tahni as much as it did initially. After all, Vivienne understood the emotional stakes better than most from personal experience.

Tahni absentminedly rubbed her left forearm as she stared at the map of Thedas in the former war room. The little wooden wolf Blackwall had been so kind as to carve for her sat on the edge of the table as it had been doing for weeks. She sighed quietly to herself.

_I'm fine._

**Author's Note:**

> There are a couple of references that don't make sense yet, but will once I post my DABB piece. I just didn't want to wait that long to post this in case anything changes.


End file.
